Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra


Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra was a Brazilian army officer and politician, who served as a colonel in the Brazilian Army.

Biography

Born in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Ustra was the head of the DOI-CODI, an investigation division of the Second Army from 1970 to 1974. He became known by the codename Dr. Tibiriçá. While head of DOI-CODI, 47 people officially died, although further investigation attributed 502 tortures to the division under his administration.
In 2008, Ustra became the first military official to be recognized, by a civil court in São Paulo, as a torturer during the dictatorship. He continued to be politically active in military clubs, in defense of the military dictatorship and anticommunist critics.
He died at the age of 83 on 15 October 2015 of pneumonia caused by multiple organ failure after several weeks in hospital in Brasília.

Legacy

In 17 April 2016, during the voting of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in the Chamber of Deputies, Ustra was praised by deputy and future president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro in his discourse, calling him as "the dread of Dilma Rousseff".
In 8 August 2019 Jair Bolsonaro, now president of Brazil, called him a "national hero who prevented Brazil from fall into that the left-wing wants today".